So it seems that Richard Perle, the éminence noire of the current neo-con cabal is, at the heart of it all, just a mundane old kleptocrat after all, not a courageous, idealistic “true believer” in anything?
Okay, maybe he’s both.
But as this report in today’s WaPo makes clear, there are plenty of his former colleagues on the board of the media conglomerate Hollinger International who now say he was just in it for the money. $5.4 million in bonuses and compensation, to be precise.
Hollinger– which owns the Chicago Sun-Times, the Jerusalem Post, and until recently London’s right-kookie Daily Telegraph— was put together and run the originally Canadian (now also British) Likudnik Conrad Black.
Some of the shareholder reps on the Hollinger board commissioned the report after the company nearly went totally belly-up last November.
Perle, also a director of the company, got that $5.4 million in a series of sweetheart deals with Black. WaPo’s Frank Ahrens writes that the latest report said, “Perle should return the money.”
More greats from Faiza
Faiza Jarrar, the wise and talented author of A family in Baghdad, had another great English-language post up yesterday. It looked like she wrote it last Friday–which was SUCH a tense and momentous day in Iraq. I can only imagine how she felt as she wrote.
Anyway, if you don’t have time to read the whole thing, here are two of the parts I found most interesting.
First, her writing about what Najaf and its extensive cemeteries mean to her:
- Najaf city became a sacred symbol to Muslims, especially Shi’aa, where they bury their dead.Graveyards in Najaf are vast, endless cities, as if without boundaries…as if they are real cities, but its residents are in another world, having different customs…differing from the cities of ordinary people. On its walls there are writings: Peace be upon you, people of – NO GOD BUT THE ONE GOD, you are the former, we are the latter…When I read it I feel spiritually calm, shy from the dead, and feel sad for the fate of all humanity. Every year we go, my sisters and I, to visit my parent’s graves…we take fruits and pastries to distribute among the poor, asking them to read Al-Fatihaa Verse (The first verse in Quran) for the souls of our dead…we sit by the graves, lighting candles, reading the Holy Quran, remembering our loved ones, and we cry for their separation from us… and when we get back to Baghdad…I keep thinking all the way: How petty life is, how a human should live in all honesty and truthfulness, because he will surly die, so die an honest, well-remembered person, better than dying a villain who harmed people and stole their rights, or spilled their blood without justification… And I remember the words of Imam Ali (Peace be upon him): Death is the best preacher…meaning- that remembering death schools the soul, and purifies it from greed and follies.And also his words: Work for your life as if you will live forever, and work for your after-life as if you will die tomorrow…
Interview with Iyad Moussawi, translated
On a Comments board here last week, one commenter referred to an interview Sayyid Iyad Moussawi (or, in French, Ayad Moussawi) gave to Le Monde‘s Baghdad correspondent, last Thursday (8/26).
Well now, a JWN reader has taken up my invitation to translate the whole interview. Here it is. Big thanks to the friend who sent it!
The interview is now a little outdated, given the torrent of events sparked by Ayatollah Ali Sistani’s bold, peaceful initiative. But it provides a glimpse into the thinking of someone well placed in Sistani’s entourage. Cécile Hennion, the interviewer, describes Moussawi as:
- the head of the Constitutional and Political Union of the Seyyeds (the descendants of the Prophet) and the Tribal Chiefs in Iraq; he is also a member of the Marjaya (the hightest Shiites authority) and close to Grand Ayatollah Ali Al-Sistani. Put under house arrest and arrested several times under Saddam Hussein’s regime, he never left Iraq. He was also among the clerics who negotiated the Najaf truce in June.
The things I found most interesting in the interview were the harshness of the criticism Moussawi expressed about the Allawi government, and the way he described what I’d call the “intentional nonviolence” of the march that Sistani planned to make. First, on the Allawi government:
Outbreak of politics in Iraq?
The major media are usually drawn to war and violence like a moth to light. Bang-bang-bang!!! That will get you on the front page! Anyway, war is just so much more, well, exciting, and graphic…
All the better news to see, therefore, that Monday WaPo has an intriguing piece by Rajiv Chandrasekaran that leads with this:
- Iraq’s interim prime minister, Ayad Allawi, said Sunday that he had held private meetings with representatives of insurgent groups from the restive cities of Fallujah, Ramadi and Samarra to persuade them to accept a government amnesty offer.
Allawi described the meetings as designed,
- to split the insurgency by luring lower-ranking members away from harder-core elements. Although he said he has not reached agreement with any of the groups, he insisted that some of the representatives are “changing horses . . . and taking the amnesty seriously.”
As Chandra notes, these meetings,
- represent the most significant effort yet to address the insurgency [in western Iraq] through political rather than military means.
Is peace about to break out in Iraq? Well, it’s far too early to conclude that yet. There is still a lot of violence and killing in various different parts of the country.
But still, it is notable that the dramatic initiative that Ayatollah Sistani undertook last week has cleared some space in which some political rather than only military interactions have started to happen.
Hallalujah!
As Chandra notes, Allawi’s meetings with the emissaries from Fallujah, etc., have not been the only acts of political bridge-building in recent days:
Larry Franklin Affair, contd.
Kudos to Laura Rozen of “War and Piece” for the interview she got in which wellknown international arms-and-snakeoil salesman Manouchar Ghorbanifar spoke (=bragged) about the number of meetings he’s had about the Iran situation with Michael LeSleaze; the Italian Defense Minister and the head of Italian Military Intelligence; and Harold Rhode and Larry Franklin from Doug Feith’s office.
It surprises me not one whit that Ghorby and LeSleaze (a.k.a. Ledeen), who have been co-conspirators from the the days of the Iran-contra affair of the mid-1980s, if not before, would have had numerous meetings in recent years. Heck, they’re probably godfathers for each other’s children, or whatever the relevant cultural indicator of familial intimacy is.
There is nothing I find “shocking” in that– not even knowing that LeSleaze was hired to be a consultant to Wolfie at the DOD at some point. LeSleaze also has a long, nasty history of dirty business with the Italian military “intel” folks.
And it seems kinda unexceptional that LeSleaze would have taken his good friends Rhode and Franklin to meet with Ghorby and the Italians, either… Except that, according to the Washington Monthly story by Rozen, Josh Marshall, and Peter Glastris, the US Ambassador in Italy–where most or all of the meetings were held–didn’t know about them. And when the ambassador, Mel Sembler, found out about one of the meetings, in December 2001, he “ratted” on the conspirators to the local CIA station chief and to his own boss, Colin Powell.
Powell and CIA head George Tenet then went screaming to the NSC leadership. Obviously!! They knew that Ghorbanifar had been bad news ever since the days of the Iran-Contra affair, and must have asked what the heck Feith’s people thought they were doing meeting with him!?!??? According to the WaMo article, the Italian mil-intel chief had also checked in with Tenet…
Anyway, the upshot was that Condi Rice’s deputy, Stephen Hadley put the word out: No more meetings with Ghorbanifar. But soon enough, the meetings resumed…
Thus far, the whole story seems unexceptional. It is quite possible that Feith and his people– who don’t really know that much about Iran (see Juan Cole’s take on this)–could be fairly easily seduced by the promises of that practiced snake-oil salesman Manouchar Ghorbanifar… Especially if he came with the warm recommendation of Wolfowitz consultant Michael LeSleaze…
So I can see Franklin and Rhode going along to the meetings throughout 2002, flush with excitement, thinking, “Hey, for Iraq we’ve got ‘our man’ Chalabi– and now, for Iran, we’ve got all this hot info from ‘our man’ Ghorbanifar!!! And we’re his main handlers! Yay for us!!!”
I’ve written much on JWN before about just how eager the neo-cons were to buy all the snake-oil that Chalabi was selling them up to March 2003. (Like here and here.) It doesn’t take too much imagination to realize that similar kinds of people hearing the practiced blandishments of old Ghorby could be similarly seduced…
And it seems that, from another end of the story, the reason the FBI made its hurried public announcement on Friday about the investigations and possible arrests at the Franklin end of the case was because CBS’s Lesley Stahl was about to break that part of the story on “60 Minutes”.
However, a number of intriguing questions and loose ends remain to be clarified:
The Israeli spying accusation: big questions!
Such interesting news yesterday about the FBI “investigating a mid-level Pentagon official who specializes in Iranian affairs for allegedly passing classified information to Israel…”
That WaPo account there names the chief suspect as Larry Franklin, described as a desk officer in the Pentagon’s Near East and South Asia Bureau, which is run by neo-con William J. Luti.
(The NYT doesn’t name the suspect, and says he worked for the Pentagon’s #3 guy, Douglas Feith. Feith and Luti are strongly pro-Likud figures who were both heavily involved in creating the “alternative intel universe” that produced the “justifications” for launching the invasion of Iraq. Feith is more senior that Luti.)
The accusation is that Franklin handed Israel classified assessments of Iran’s nuclear capabilities. Much more stunning than that: un-named “law enforcement officials” (presumably from the FBI) told the WaPo and other media that the documents were handed to Israel via AIPAC, the hitherto unassailable “armored bulldozer” of pro-Israeli influence in US political life.
There are at least four intriguing aspects to this story:
(1) That the suspect works in such a strategically sensitive and politically controversial shop in the Pentagon, and was presumably under the protection there of an extremely politically powerful boss– whether Feith, or Luti. Is someone trying to “get at” one of those two more powerful figures by taking down his protégé first?
(2) That– given the already existing, extremely close links at all levels up to the very highest between the national-security policymakers in this administration and in Sharon’s Israel — Israel would have felt the need to do any extra-curricular spying at all! Israel security officials already have the virtually free run of the whole Pentagon! To put it bluntly: why would they need to suborn Larry Franklin when they already have Dougie Feith in their pocket (with the full permission of Feith’s superiors)?
(3) That people in the FBI are willing to publicly finger AIPAC. That takes guts! They must, presumably, have some extremely conclusive evidence. Otherwise, expect to see the FBI’s budget shut down completely with a single snap of AIPAC’s fingers in next year’s budget, should AIPAC decide to counter-attack.
(4) That the government has apparently given Franklin and his associates a few days more leisure between announcing their intention to arrest them, and actually doing so. The WaPo piece says: “arrests in the case could come as early as next week, officials at the Pentagon and other government agencies said.”
This last aspect of the case is truly mind-boggling!
Continue reading “The Israeli spying accusation: big questions!”
Salam/Pax is back!
Hey, folks, Salam/Pax has been blogging from Baghdad since August 9! This is great news for all of us who relied on his wry, Baghdad-based view of world in the months leading up to and immediately after the US/UK invasion.
(Big kudos to faithful JWN lurker Marjolein for telling me of S’s return.)
Salam says he’s just going to be back in Baghdad for 5 weeks this time. He’s been down in Najaf and doing some t.v. documentaries for the BBC with the Mahdi Army, on which he has some good observations.
It also seems his father is a minister in the Allawist government. Which gives Salam a unique perspective:
News from the gulag: Gitmo branch
There’s lots happening in the United States’ global detentions gulag. I haven’t had a chance to blog about the Fay/Jones report yet. But there are some under-reported things that have been happening in the important Gitmo branch of the gulag that I want to note.
The “Military Commissions” (quasi-‘trials’) that will make a final disposition on the cases brought before them have finally–more than 30 months into the detention of most of the prisoners in Gitmo–begun this week.
Human Rights Watch’s website has a good page that explains the difference between the “military commissions” and the other two types of quasi-judicial hearing that are now–slowly–happening on Gitmo.
So this week, the first detainees–oops, sorry, make that ‘defendants’; or, on the other hand, maybe not?– have had “their day in court” in the military commission hearing room. It has not so far been an easy week for the people running the commission.
Deborah Pearlstein of Human Rights First has been observing the proceedings, and HRF has been running her very informative, blog-type journal of what she’s been seeing there. (She’s been running one or two days behind. I sympathize with her. Still, it’s well done and certainly worth reading.)
First up Tuesday was Yemeni national Salim Ahmed Hamdan…
Transition time in Najaf and all Iraq?
The latest reports from Najaf show a point in Iraq’s history that seems to be a real turning-point. The Greek word for that is “crisis”. It seems the situation still could go either way; and no doubt about it, the stakes are very high.
From here, it could go radically either toward fitna (widespread breakdown) or toward peace.
Sistani, currently sitting on the edge of Najaf, has called for both the Sadrists and the occupation forces to stop fighting and also to evacuate the city. According to Al-Jazeera:
- Minutes before al-Sistani’s arrival, interim Prime Minister Iyyad Allawi said he had ordered his forces to observe a 24-hour ceasefire in Najaf to allow the negotiations to take place.
He also offered an amnesty deal to besieged al-Mahdi Army fighters and safe passage for their leader al-Sadr.
That’s good news. Until now, the Americans have all been pretending that Allawi and his henchmen have been “calling the shots” around Najaf. It would be nice if the US forces participated in the ceasefire and the broader Sistani peace plan, too.
More than nice!
Another Jazeera story notes that while the US forces were still maintaining their potentially offensive posture around the Sadrists in the shrine, it was the UK command that provided the air cover for the Sistani trip to Najaf. There’s doubtless much more of a story to be teased out there. (Including the whole story of who it was who persuaded Sistani that he “needed” to be whisked off to London 18 days ago, in the first place.)
Sistani’s plan also calls for the “Iraqi security forces” to take over security in Najaf. Those forces are a real wild card. They’ve suffered a lot of attrition from (generally, pro-Sadrist) defections, and now seem in many respects to be acting like a lot of deracinated, war-crazed goons. For evidence, see reports like this one (Reuters, 9:30 EST), that:
- At least 10 supporters of Iraq’s top Shi’ite cleric were shot dead in Najaf Thursday when gunmen opened fire at police who were trying to control the crowd, prompting the police to return fire, witnesses said.
Or, the many reports of the forced-attendance “press conference” the local police chief held late Wednesday. Chris Allbritton wrote that “he”–presumably the police chief?– told the forcibly rounded-up journos that:
- The Shrine would be stormed tonight…, and we would be allowed to get on a bus and go visit it tomorrow to see the damage the Mahdi Army had done to it. The Sistani protesters in Kufa were really Mahdi guys and they had to be killed.
Since I’m working so intensively these days on the early-1990s transition to democracy in South Africa, I have to quickly note some possible parallels.
One is the real danger of so-called “third force” activities…
Can Sistani save the situation?
This is the best news I could imagine from Iraq. It’s a Reuters report from Michael Georgy in Najaf, saying that Ayatollah Sistani had already reached Basra from Kuwait in a ground convoy… And Sistani’s asking all Iraqis to join him in a march to Najaf.
It will be so interesting to see (a) how many thousands of Iraqis do this, (b) whether the march will be nonviolent, and (c) how they arrange the logistics of getting into the city through the US lines.
I have seen signs before that Sistani has some interest in the power of nonviolent mass organizing. This project he is launching now could (though we don’t know yet) be a major project in this genre.
Here’s what Georgy writes:
- “We ask all believers to volunteer to go with us to Najaf,” Sistani said in a statement read out on his behalf in Basra by his aide Hayder al-Safi. “I have come for the sake of Najaf and I will stay in Najaf until the crisis ends.”
Sistani’s aides said he would leave for Najaf at 7 a.m. (4 a.m. British time) on Thursday with his supporters. They urged the militia to leave the mosque and U.S. forces not to interfere…
As for the Sadrists: